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The website Vacation Rentals By Owner offers the promise of 150,000 properties to rent for days, weeks or months. Most listings show pictures of the properties and traveler reviews.

Boulder resident Jason Mendelson spent about $10,000 for a three-month rental of a one-bedroom house in Yountville, California, a Napa town renowned for its culinary offerings. The house had racked up several positive reviews from renters on VRBO.com.

About a month and a half into the rental period, after hearing late night scratching through the walls, Mendelson's fiancé realized that the house had been infested with rats. The owner Lupe DeLeon says rats are an unfortunate epidemic in the area (disconcerting for diners who shell out small fortunes for a meal at nearby Thomas Keller's French Laundry). For Mendelson and his fiancé, the rat outbreak led to disputes with DeLeon over cleaning fees and reimbursement for a hotel stay.

Chalking it up to a bad experience, Mendelson simply wanted to give his appraisal of the landlord and property in the same place where other renters had written their positive reviews on VRBO.com. Mendelson sent his comments to VRBO. But a week later, Mendelson made a surprising discovery. Instead of posting his opinion of the property, VBRO removed all reviews for DeLeon’s listing.

"My ultimate issue was not with the landlord. I thought I owed it to the VRBO community to let them know what my experience was," says Mendelson. "I was extremely disappointed that they don't want to have a transparent marketplace of communication about these things." Mendelson's initial review is now posted on his personal blog.

Mendelson’s experience raises the question of what types of disclosures consumers should expect on sites that let strangers exchange goods and services. DeLeon pays $300 per year to list each of his properties on VRBO.com. "Owners say they pay us to advertise their properties so they feel like they should have a say," says Alexis De Belloy, a Vice President at Vacation Rentals By Owner's parent company, Home Away.com. DeLeon agrees: "I didn't want to give them the opportunity to just trash me," he says. "I know I could've responded on the site, but I didn't want to get into it."

VRBO's official policy is to let owners either open up their properties to all reviews, both positive and negative, or none, says De Belloy. De Belloy says VRBO.com is the only one of HomeAway's 15 websites, including three US vacation rental sites, that allows owners to opt out of reviews. On HomeAway's other websites, he says, owners must show all reviews. DeLeon, who lists three other properties in California and Mexico on VRBO, still shows traveler reviews on his other properties.

VRBO did not engage in overtly deceptive advertising. Mary Engle, the associate director for advertising practices with the Federal Trade Commission, says the agency has clear rules for what constitutes deceptive advertising. The FTC, she says, might take action against a website which posted only positive reviews and dropped negative ones without making that clear to the consumer. Still she says the FTC hasn't seen a case like this yet, and VRBO's opt-out policy clearly doesn't fit into that paradigm.

The company's policy does raise questions about overall transparency and consumer expectations online and on new online marketplaces, forums that are rapidly proliferating. VRBO tries to both serve potential buyers who want more insight into properties they might rent and sellers who pay the website for the service of listing their homes. While consumers wouldn't expect other companies that sell goods online to air every consumer gripe, VRBO appears to trade on the crowdsourcing check on quality that sites like Yelp offer by posting reviews. Yet, VRBO is ultimately a forum for paid advertising. While consumers who spend enough time on the site might realize that some owners have opted out of reviews and come to understand VRBO's policy, it's not explicitly clear.

Social media has democratized the public airing of complaints. Anyone can post negative reviews on their personal blog and hope for an audience. As a managing director at Boulder, Colorado venture firm The Foundry Group, Mendelson has an outsized social media presence and more ways to get the word out than the typical consumer. Other people had similar experiences, as you can see from the comments' section of his blog.

Have you had a similar experience with reviews or overall transparency on other websites? Drop me a line at mfarrell@forbes.com or leave a comment below.